Polynomial Texture Mapping (PTM) is a technique that uses ordinary digital photography equipment alongside directional lighting. It produces images that can be lit from any direction, as if you had the real object in front of you. It is an excellent technique for analysing fine details on surfaces, something that has particular utility in archaeology.

The full text will be available online after the next edition of BA comes out.

The photo above is of the PTM illumination dome which I designed and built at Wessex Archaeology. You can see more details about the dome in my building a PTM illumination dome Flickr set. I have much more to say about PTM, so stay tuned.

Find out more about the Wessex Archaeology PTM rig and see interactive examples.

Without further ado, introducing… Archaeopix!

The homepage features a photo of the day, which we hope to update daily. Clicking “Search” on the navigation bar takes you to the tool where you can look for CC licensed images which have been posted to a hand-picked series of groups and accounts on Flickr:

This is what Alun has to say about the search tool:

The clever bit is the search page.

Searching Flickr can be hit ‘n’ miss. Generally if you want to use a photo for a blog or educational handout and you need it quickly, it needs to be licensed under a creative commons licence. You can search on Flickr for cc-licensed photos, but a search for “Rome” will bring up everything with Rome in it. Groups are handy because they’re themed. So you could search the Archaeology group for Rome. The problem then is that you’ll find a lot of ©opyright photos. You really need a group which is all cc-licensed. Chiron is a good example of that. However Chiron’s strength is that it focuses on the classical world, which means you won’t find prehistoric Europe in it, or anything Mayan. This is where Archaeopix search comes in.

Head over to Alun’s Archaeoastronomy blog to read more about Archaeopix.

Link: Archaeopix

The Festival of British Archaeology (formerly National Archaeology Week) is your unique chance to discover and explore the archaeological heritage of the United Kingdom. During this two-week archaeological extravaganza, which will run from Saturday 18th July to Sunday 2nd August, you can take part in excavation open days, hands-on activities, family fun days, guided tours, exhibitions, lectures, ancient art and craft workshops and much, much more.

The aim of this annual event is to encourage everyone, including young people and their families to visit sites of archaeological/historical interest or museums, heritage and resource centres, to see archaeology in action and to take part in activities on-site.

The Festival is a celebration of both British archaeology and of the presentation of archaeology from around the world in Britain. Events take place annually all over the UK.

The Festival of British Archaeology is the new name for National Archaeology Week (which has been taking place since 2005, as an expansion of National Archaeology Days, which were established in 1990). The Festival retains the general format of National Archaeology Week but gives everyone even more opportunity to participate in a wide range of archaeology related activities and events across the UK, by spreading the events over a fortnight.

More details can be found at the Festival of British Archaeology website.

This is an animation that I put together at Wessex Archaeology for the Society of Antiquaries‘ Making History exhibition at Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum.

I posted some more information about the animation over at the Wessex Archaeology Computing Blog, so I won’t repeat myself here!

I am happy to announce that the full text of Making People Believe is now online (without images due to restrictive copyright agreements).

Feel free to discuss the article in a comment below.

The data is released under an Attribution Non-Commercial Creative Commons license. This is good news for archaeologists and other interested parties to be able to reuse and share the data, and another step forward towards opening up data about our past.

Framework Archaeology also distribute a (Windows-based) free data viewer, which provides basic GIS functionality for viewing the Stansted and Heathrow Terminal 5 data. The installation process is simple – download the Free Viewer (as it is called) and run the installer. Then download the dataset, run the dataset installer, launch the software, and explore away…

For those that just want the raw Stansted data, the formats for download include csv, xml, gml, shp, data dictionary, photos (jpg), and sections (jpg).

The excavation data for Heathrow Terminal 5 was released by Framework Archaeology in a similar way last August.

Making data from such an important archaeological excavation is a great philosophical move, and I do hope that more organisations follow suit. The key will be to see what (if anything) people do with this data…

The article, entitled “Making People Believe” is about the state of archaeological computing today, where it has come from, and where we believe it is going. The official blurb is as follows:

When computers were new, the buzz was about science and sums. Now digital technology is commonplace, say Leif Isaksen, Tom Goskar and Paul Cripps, the impact on archaeology is to assist open participation and intuitive analysis. They show just a few of the ways this might happen.

I came up with the idea of writing the article after a discussion about the dwindling numbers of people studying archaeological computing at universities. Many people are still surprised when I explain what I do – the connection between archaeologists and computers isn’t one that is very often made.

We perhaps are responsible for remaining too “back stage” with our work. I felt that it was time that we did something positive for our profile, beginning with an article in an archaeology publication that people could actually buy in shops for not much money. Most archaeologists prefer to publish in relatively (relative to interested people outside the profession) obscure peer-reviewed journals that only large university libraries can afford to buy. We publish to ourselves an awful lot.

In a few months time, the text of Making People Believe will be available for free online on the British Archaeology website. It doesn’t get much more open and accessible than that (other than printing it and posting it through letterboxes).

A quick word about the title. We (the authors) had a working title, the rather unimpressive but descriptive “Archaeology in the Digital Age”, but the editor decided to choose something else for the final cut. Personally speaking, it’s not a title I particularly like, but hopefully the words of the feature itself will speak for themselves.

So if you’d like to learn how archaeologists use computers, and how silicon has become more ubiquitous than steel, as well as a raft of other excellent features, head down to your local newsagents (well, Borders and WH Smith at least) and for £4.25 the most excellent 100th edition of British Archaeology can be yours.

You can read Past Horizons either on Scribd or via the rather fancy full-screen digipage version, which even curls the page as you turn it, complete with playable videos. It’s well worth checking out.

It takes a bit of getting used to the interface, but to have this information publicly available is a step in the right direction.

Tip: find the area you are interested on the map. Click the pushpin on or near a feature that you are interested in. Then click the “In the area” tab. Select “Sites and Monuments Record” on the left. You will then see features nearest the pin. Click the name of the feature you’re interested in, and a new window with details pops up. From the details page you can view the feature exactly on a map, or on Google Maps. It will open endless new windows, but that’s a small price to pay for having this information freely available.

This is of course a boon for all the Stonehenge buffs out there, as you’ll be able to explore the surrounding landscape and get a better appreciation for what’s below the soil as well as above it.

Link: Wiltshire SMR, LocalView map interface

[Update] The map doesn’t seem to work in Firefox or any other Mozilla-based browser (such as Flock). It does work in Internet Explorer on a PC, and Safari on a Mac, however.

This short film (hosted by the fabulous Vimeo) shows just how exciting archaeology can be!

Opening a Roman Coffin from Wessex Archaeology on Vimeo.

There is a shortened (10 minute) version on YouTube for the masses. But Vimeo wins hands down for video quality.

For the more technically inclined reader, the film was made with a Sony DCR-TRV50E MiniDV camcorder without a tripod (the tripod head went walkies), and was edited in iMovie ‘08 on a Mac.

More information about the burial can be found at Wessex Archaeology.